Every Friday, AV Club staff start our weekly open thread for discussing game plans and recent game highlights, but of course the real action in the comments is where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What are you playing this weekend?
It took video games a long time to bring in superheroes. Despite being, on paper, a pretty obvious fit – some with their shared interest in serving power fantasies for the easily amused – games have long struggled to conquer the raw freedom and power that the average mid-tier X -Man sticks out in a 20-page comic book on a monthly basis. Apparently, the catch-up only really started in 2004 Spider-Man 2, who, for the first time, accurately captured Peter Parker’s feelings, * twip * -way his way across the New York skyline. (Hell, it’s 2020, and Superman’s never have one really good game.)
Sixteen years later, the list of “Actually Good Superhero Games” finally reaches a point where we could comfortably mark “robust”. Between Batman’s Arkham match, the continued success of Spider-Man, de Lego riffs on Marvel and DC heroes alike, and even homemade riffs on the concept like the Infamous series, gaming finally seems to have its grip on letting players go bigger than life in their super-bright adventures.
It is in this context that Square Enix dropped the open beta for its long-in-the-works, somewhat long-awaited Marvel’s Avengers match last weekend. Developed by Crystal Dynamics, and first released back in 2017 (circa) the second Guardians Of The Galaxy film, in the context of the MCU), the game promises to put you in control of the most powerful heroes on earth as they try to get their shit together in the wake of a major disaster. In practice, it seems to be mostly about Square experimenting to see how much Lot DNA can shake you into a video game before a funny little robot jumps out and starts making out.
Of course, some of the problems with the beta are not one’s fault; it is a beta, so glitches and bugs are part of the (free) price of access. Meanwhile, you can not necessarily blame the studio for versions of these characters that look like exactly enough like her MCU colleagues to be distracting, without actually looking or sounding much like her. (Even if Nolan North’s obvious efforts to channel Robert Downey Jr. before his takeover of Iron Man do very little to dispel the idea that we’ll get the Disney On Ice versions of these iconic characters.) No. , the real sin is having playable versions of the Avengers that do not feel powerful, nor heroic – especially since we know at this point that it can definitely be done.
Take the Hulk. As the first former Avenger recruited by newcomer Kamala Khan as she tries to reunite the band in the wake of the A-Day tragedy, Hulk gets most of the focus in the big, show-offy story mission of the beta, and fight his way through a lab led by the game’s big baddie, Advanced Idea Mechanics. The problem here is that Hulk does not throw as much as shrug; the design of the game – that you grow, God of the war-style, against arenas full of semi-robust enemies – makes it hard to really feel like your stuff is ripping apart like the Hulk probably should. This is especially noticeable when you consider the game’s RPG mechanics, which means that an under-leveled Banner can sometimes whale for several seconds with a single impact on a regular AIM goon. Instead of feeling like a monster tearing the battlefield apart, you feel like a little more like a slightly bigger guy, with slightly slower strokes.
What’s most annoying about this, though, is that we have evidence that you to be able to make a good one Hulk game, in the form of 2005s The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Developed by the team at Radical Entertainment – whoever applies the same basic principles to their even more destructive Prototype match-Ultimate destruction worked because it could be Hulk Hulk. Sure, you could not really level the city where its open world took place. But the game will never let you forget that you were a raging incarnation of the human id, throwing you through cars, tanks, and just about anything else that was stupid and difficult enough to get your way. It did not bother to make sure that the threats that were thrown at the Hulk were balanced or honest, because Hulk’s net balanced, standard. Hulk is not “strongest one within a tightly controlled set of criteria designed to ensure that characters are competitive in the meta”; Hulk strongest there is!
But the Hulk of Marvel’s Avengers can not do that. He has to fit – against all odds and character precedent – because this is a multiplayer game where almost every Avenger must be functionally interchangeable as players swap them in and out. But the same need for agreement defeats the whole point of playing as an extraordinary individual. We read and see Hulk stories because we want him to do those things only Hulk can do, ie wreck shop, smash dirty people, and generally be an engine of absolute, destructive, semi-heroic chaos. Making him enjoy playing with others draws the most fun out of the character – and that’s something no post-beta patch is likely to fix.
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